Re: a "fonts-recommended" metapackage?
On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 10:43:59PM +0100, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 05.02.2019, 21:10 +0000 schrieb Nathan Willis:
> > I'm saying: that's five metapackages. Not one that does-everything-
> > possible. Having 'fonts-wordprocessing' and 'fonts-os-compatibility'
> > both available (etc.) is a better experience than trying to roll them
> > all into one.
>
> Why? Being fine-grained has never been a goal. We want one big meta-
> package that installs a reasonable set of fonts that serve the four (or
> five, whatever way you count it) most requested purposes. We want a
> good base set, just as any other operating system installs on the
> user's fresh system.
Yeah -- a lot of small metapackages goes against my goal: being able to
install a nice set without having to think. There's no much reason to
think about "bloat", at least where disk space is concerned.
But, there is a different kind of bloat. Having too many fonts is a thing,
thus I wonder about kicking Noto off the list -- for some reason it presents
every single of its ranges as a separate family, making font selection
dialogs quite unusable.
> > I know that someone asking me "what fonts should I install for full
> > Unicode coverage" is drastically easier to answer defensibly and with
> > confidence than "what fonts should I use" in the abstract.
Actually, the Unicode coverage question can be measured. It's easy to
extract the list of codepoints provided by every font, and see which ranges
we lack.
> Nobody asks "what fonts should I use". Maybe the question should be
> rephrased to "what set of fonts should I have on the system so I feel
> the least urge to immediately install more other fonts?". It's clear to
> all of us that this cannot cover the most exotic use cases but merely a
> common denominator for the average user.
Yeah, exactly. If you're some kind of designer, then this package won't
be enough for you. That's not its intent.
So, let's address comments I received so far:
* The `fonts-liberation2` and `fonts-croscore` packages should be
alternative dependencies, as the former is a nearly-identical fork of the
latter.
-- ✓
* We should probably only recommend the fonts (instead of depending on
them), so it is easy to get the whole set, but also possible to remove
some unloved children afterwards.
-- not sure about that -- if you pick fonts on your own, you can just
install them without this metapackage.
* We should probably add one-line comments to each font that explains, *why*
we consider this as recommended.
-- ✓
* Also, what is `fonts-symbola`'s role here?
-- only font that provides the text presentation for emojis.
* Also, why `fonts-noto-mono`? There are at least three other fonts sets in
the list that provide a monospaced font.
-- good point, need to take a look at Unicode coverage though.
* please add fonts-noto-color-emoji
-- that's the "emoji presentation"; less likely to work than text
presentation but the font has wider coverage than symbola. Good to have
both I guess.
My further ideas:
* would it be good to consider kicking Noto out, for making font selection
in most program crowded to the point of uselessness?
* are there fonts you'd want in for non-functional reasons?
Meow!
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